Letter 573 from Extract from the Fliess Papers

… The idea of bringing in the witches is gaining strength, and I think it hits the mark. Details are beginning to crowd in. Their ‘flying’ is explained; the broomstick they ride on is probably the great Lord Penis. Their secret gatherings, with dancing and other amusements, can be seen any day in the

streets where children play. I read one day that the gold which the Devil gives his victims regularly turns into faeces; and the next day Herr E.,1 who describes his old nurse's money-deliria2 to me, suddenly (by a round-about path viâ; Cagliostro-alchemist-Dukatenscheisser3) said that Louise's money was always faeces. So in the witch stories it is merely being transformed back into the substance from which it arose. If only I knew why the Devil's semen is always described as ‘cold’ in the witches’ confessions! I have ordered a copy of Malleus Maleficarum and, now that I have put the final touch to my Kinderlähmungen, I shall study it diligently.4 The story of the Devil, the vocabulary of popular swear-words, the songs and habits of the nursery-all these are now gaining significance for me. Can you without trouble recommend me some good reading from your well-stocked memory? In connection with the dancing in witches’ confessions, remember the dance-epidemics in the Middle Ages. E.'s Louise was a dancing witch of that kind; he was first, consistently enough, reminded of her at the ballet: hence his theatre-anxiety.

Alongside of flying and floating on the air are to be put the gymnastic feats of boys in hysterical attacks, etc.

I have an idea shaping in my mind that in the perversions, of which hysteria is the negative,5 we may have before us a residue of a primaeval sexual cult which, in the Semitic East (Moloch, Astarte), was once, perhaps still is, a religion.…

Perverse actions, moreover, are always the same-with a meaning and made on some pattern which it will be possible to understand.

I dream, therefore, of a primaeval Devil religion,